We made it! At 10:45 pm we dropped anchor in a little bight just off the beach where the convention center is located. 800 miles, in 14 travel days, at 5 mph, averaging 10 - 12 hours per day. Shew! We are ready for some shore leave!
We departed Panama City immediately after breakfast and ran good all morning.
The following pictures show two tugs positioning this cargo ship to the dock in Panama City. This was interesting to me because my brother used to work on a tug.
We were moving along just great and thinking about having lunch with an anticipated arrival time of just before sunset. And then......I ran us aground...AGAIN! And this time it looked pretty serious.
Here's where it happened. We were just ready to leave Lynn Haven sound which felt like open water. Just beyond the bridge is where the safety of another bayou ditch begins. So close and yet so far away! And as a side note, I was only JUST outside of the rhumb line between the two red markers...but obviously that's all it takes sometimes.
Carter tried everything including an attempt to toss the anchor out enough to skegg off. Obviously we were grasping at straws. Our dink has a flat from running into some oysters in Stienhatchee and we havn't had a chance to patch it yet so launching that was not a desirable option. The wind was strong and kept blowing us further onto the bank. Worse yet, the tide was about to go out.
There was a pod of about 6 dolphins playing around us for about an hour. Then a man and his wife on a fishing boat stopped and was kind enough to try to help us by driving by creating waves to try to lift us up enough to get free but to no avail, his boat was too small. But before they gave up, he carried our anchor out into the channel so we could try and skegg off again however Carter wasn't holding out too much hope for this maneuver, we were HARD aground and the tide was receding by now.
We continued to dump our water to lighten up but at about a gallon per minute we were only dumping 60 gallons an hour so we weren't getting lighter very fast. Finally,with the anchor in place now so that we wouldn't drift any farther out of the channel, Carter decided to try and dredge us out with the motor in reverse for a while. This kicked up a lot of mud and looked promising. We were just on the edge of the channel and only needed to get about 30 feet and we would be off the bank. After about 30 minutes of dredging and running back and forth, we worked ourselves free! We were back in the channel on our way again after our 2 long hour ordeal!
Further down the ditch we came across this right smack in the middle of the channel. That could dangerous at night!
The last sunset of this passage. We anchored just a couple hours after that in Ft. Walton Beach.
Let the vacation begin!
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